IVIV, "the place was turning out to be bigger inside than out", p.21

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Mark:
 
> A favorite trope of Pynchon's used in M & D---inside of carriages--
> and elsewhere?....

Yes, in addition to that Jesuit coach, "wherein the inside is quite
noticeably larger than the outside, though the fact cannot be appreciated
until one is inside" (M&D, 354), we also have the city James's Town on St.
Helena: "Tho' small in secular Dimensions, [...] yet entering, ye discover
its true Extent" (M&D, 126); the garden behind Jenkin's Ear Museum: "The
Walls are markedly higher in here than he remembers them from the Street"
(M&D, 180); and of course Lepton's Castle:
 
"Mason and Dixon [...] come upon a cabin, hardly more than a shed, [...]
yet, its ancient doorsill once traversed, the Surveyors find more room 
inside than could possibly be contained in the sorrowing ruin they
believ'd they were entering" (M&D, 412).
 
And in IV, the trope also appears on p. 251, in one of Riggs's zomes, where
Doc discovers "more space, judging from the outside, than there could 
possibly be in here."
 
Pynchon may just, as Mark argues, use this trope to describe spaces "where 
people, men & women, 'get together", share space, togetherness, company"
--- but I can't help seeing this recurrent trope as Pynchon's metaphor for
his own novels, and for fiction in general. Books certainly seem to contain
more 'space' inside than their number of cubic inches can account for, even
though that fact "cannot be appreciated until one is inside."
 
A book like AtD is app. 128 cubic inches, but it contains the World.
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